Highway to Hell (20 page)

“Nightmare,” I said succinctly, because I heard footsteps on the landing. It was a good thing the threat wasn't real, or Lisa and I would have been murdered in our beds and our skins made into a suit by now.

The barrel of a shotgun appeared first, then Teresa, swathed in a rumpled housedress. “What the hell is going on here?” She took us all in with a ferocious glance, gesturing with the gun. “Who are these boys? I thought
el chupacabra
had come to steal you girls away, and now I find you having some kind of orgy?”

“There's nothing going on, Teresa.” I raised my hands in the universal gesture for “don't shoot me.” The corner of my eye caught Justin's friend—it couldn't be anyone other than Henry—climbing to his feet without any help from Lisa.

“Then why aren't you wearing any pants?”

I dropped my arms and tugged down the hem of my
Battlestar Galáctica
T-shirt. “It's a funny story, really.”

Justin stepped up and did his thing. His trustworthy Boy Scout aura was so genuine, it was like a superpower. “It's my fault. We got here late because we took the wrong road out of San Antonio. When no one answered our knock, I worried. Especially after Maggie told me about
el chupacabra.
”

Teresa's eyes narrowed, but she stopped making conversational gestures with the shotgun. Then she saw the damage to the room. “What happened to my door? And the lamp! Who's going to pay for that?”

“We will,” I assured her. “You see, after everything that happened tonight, I had a nightmare, and when I screamed …”

“… I got a little overenthusiastic with the heroism,” Justin finished. It was the right tack to strike with her—brave men, rescuing the little ladies—even if Henry's bloody nose didn't support the image very well.

Teresa sighed, and moved the gun to the crook of her arm. “Well, you girls can't stay here. Meet me in the office and I'll give you a new room.
Two
new rooms,” she added, with a warning look at the guys.

When she left, I turned to Justin, raising a cynical brow. “I'm glad you're on our side.”

“Come on.” Lisa's tone was an audible eye roll. “I can't believe you're letting these two sexists off that easy.” She pointed at Justin. “Forget property damage, assault, and scaring the crap out of me. Sir Galahad came here to rescue you. He thinks you're a damsel in distress.”

“Don't be stupid.” Justin didn't waste any charm on Lisa. They knew each other too well.

I finally looked at him properly, without yelling and punching and armed innkeepers to distract me. His short brown hair was unkempt; his jeans and T-shirt were rumpled and creased. There were shadows under his eyes and a trace of stubble on his chin. It was almost dawn, so it didn't take a genius to figure out there'd been all-night travel involved in his getting there.

Which made him the most awesome boyfriend in the world.

“There's a difference between ‘help’ and ‘rescue,’ ” he told Lisa, proving my point. So what if he sounded a bit defensive. I was willing to excuse a little crankiness.

Henry had pulled out the desk chair and taken a seat. He was tall, dark-haired, but it was hard to tell anything beyond that, since I hadn't seen him without his face obscured—first by Lisa's fist, and now by a wet washcloth he'd gotten from the bathroom.

“So what's your excuse?” I asked.

Whatever his face looked like, his voice was an impressive, deep, Vin Diesel sort of rumble. “Road trip.”

Lisa blew out a disbelieving
“Pfft,”
and I figured I'd better redirect. “I'm Maggie. If you're wondering. And this is Lisa.”

He took in Lisa's skull and crossbones pajama pants and her black tank top
with. Did I ask you?
emblazoned across her breasts. “I guessed that.”

She bristled, and folded her arms pointedly. “And
you
are?”

Justin made a belated introduction. “I thought you'd have figured out by now. This is my friend Henry.”

Her mouth opened, and for a second no sound came out. “This is the future friar?”

Henry looked her up and down. “And you're the sorceress?”

Lisa's gray eyes narrowed dangerously, and her tone grew icy. “I prefer the term
evil genius.
The sorcery is incidental.”

Too many things had besieged me at once. I hadn't even processed the dream or its ramifications or the confusion of Justin's arrival, and now there was his mystery friend to fit into my sleep-muddled head. “You told him about us?”

Justin didn't seem to understand my consternation. “It was hard to explain the necessity for the trip without clueing him in on the particulars.”

Lisa's lip curled. “That explains it. He came to see if you're crazy, Mags. That's true friendship for you.”

Henry pointed to his nose. “And this is the thanks I get.”

I couldn't deal with the battle of the best friends. The adrenaline rush of the room invasion was fading and the nightmare was catching up. I could feel a headache looming, waiting to land on me like an Acme anvil.

“We'd better not keep Teresa waiting,” I said, rubbing my forehead with the heels of my hands.

Lisa grabbed a jacket and slipped it on over her tank top. “I'll go. You gather up our stuff.”

Justin stared at Henry until he got a clue. His friend made an elaborate show of checking his nose for blood, then got to his feet. “Why don't I go, too, and take care of our end of things.”

“Nice job, Captain Subtlety,” Lisa told Justin as she slipped on her flip-flops and headed out after Henry.

“What happened to your leg?” Justin asked the moment they were gone.

I looked down. My ankle was a Technicolor mess of purple, green, and yellow. “It looks worse than it feels.” Which wasn't strictly the truth, but the dull throb wasn't sufficient to stand out from the barrage of other crises.

He followed me as I went to the vanity and bundled toiletries into a clean towel. “Not really an answer to my question.”

“I'd rather just tell the story once.” Back to my suitcase, where I dropped the bundle in and took out a pair of shorts. “Assuming you want Henry in on the discussion.”

Justin sank onto the bed, watching me collect the rest of our stuff. “I'm confused. Maybe it's just because I haven't slept. But when you were talking the other night, asking if I'd told Henry about us—well, not about us, but about the weird stuff we've seen—I thought you were hinting that I should.”

I stared at him stupidly while my pounding head processed his meaning. “So you told him about me and Lisa, and the demon and everything?”

“I told him about you, your Sight, and Lisa studying magic to try and combat what we've encountered.” He leaned forward, peering closely at my face. “Is that a problem?”

“No.” It was ironic, though, in a be-careful-what-you-wish-for way. Justin kept a lot of his past—stuff Henry knew, because he'd been there—private from me. But at least I had the weirdness. That was our thing. Now he'd told Henry, who just happened to be studying to be a priest. There are limits to my self-assurance. Forget thinking I was crazy—what if my boyfriend's best friend thought I was going to Hell?

All of which was inconsequential next to the fact that I was sure now that we were dealing with a demon, even if I'd
yet to say it aloud. The forces of darkness tend to put things into perspective, generally speaking.

Suddenly my hands were shaking too badly to do up the zipper of my bag. Justin, observing this, took over the task. “How's your headache?”

I squinted at him. “Is it that obvious?”

He took me by the shoulders and steered me to a seat on the edge of the bed. “That must have been some dream.”

“Yeah.” I wasn't ready to go into detail just yet. “How's
your
headache?”

“I'll live.” His smile was sheepish. “If I did have delusions of riding to your rescue, shining armor or whatever, that piece of slapstick put an end to it.”

I grinned a little, reading more into the admission than just his embarrassment. He'd totally been doing the dauntless hero thing in his head.

I'd jab a sharp stick in my eye before I'd admit this to Lisa, but the white knight thing didn't bother me that much. Like she always said, Justin was Lawful Good. A paladin. It was his nature to try to protect me when my own crusader nature made me rush in where maybe I shouldn't.

“I have a confession, too,” I said, swinging my legs across his lap and pointing to my bruises. “I got that doing what I promised you I was too smart to do.”

His fingers were warm as he laid them gently on my multicolored ankle. “I didn't need any psychic powers to know that. Does it have anything to do with the nightmare?”

“Yeah.” I sighed. “We have a lot to catch up on.”

He set my feet back on the ground, stood up, and offered me a hand. “Well, let's find Lisa and Henry and get going.”

I accepted his help up off the bed; the pounding in my head made it hard to see straight. “They may have canceled each other out, like matter and antimatter.”

Justin picked up my backpack and suitcase. “In that case, we'll just look for the smoking crater.”

The last thing I grabbed was the denim shirt from the back of the desk chair, throwing it over my T-shirt, since the predawn air would be cold. As soon as I did, the throbbing in my skull disappeared. The tension evaporated from my neck and shoulders as if someone had lifted a weight off them.

It was the same feeling I'd gotten from the charm bags, which were still wrapped up, safely insulated, inside the dresser. Whoever had made the charms had made this shirt. I was going to figure out who that was—and not just to thank them.

At the moment, though, I had to admit I was pretty darn grateful.

O
ur new room looked pretty much exactly like the old room, except in mirror image and with a door still on its hinges. It occupied the upstairs west corner, and Teresa had put the guys in the downstairs east corner. Hardly subtle.

The four of us dumped our stuff in our respective quarters and reconvened in Lisa's and my room to catch each other up. The guys' story was short: insane decision to come down and help us look for
el chupacabra
, standby flight to San Antonio, rental car down to the middle of nowhere.

For our part, I recapped the accident, the reports of dead livestock, the bogus bones in the two-headed snake museum,
and ended with the stakeout with Dave. Justin prompted me for details while Henry listened silently, his chair tipped back on two legs, his arms folded across his chest.

When I finished, Henry said, “Okay, let me see if I've got this straight. The village people think that an urban legend is killing their livestock, and you all believe it because Maggie has … a feeling?”

Lisa, who had spent the last three days being the skeptic, was now the first to jump to my defense. “If you're coming in at intermission, you're just going to have to take some things on faith.”

Henry raised a brow at her phrasing. “As strange as it seems, I'm just playing devil's advocate. You're asking me to believe a lot, with no actual proof.”

Justin nudged me. He was sitting on the corner of my bed, since there was only one chair. “Show him your ankle, Maggie.”

I got up and propped my foot on the edge of the desk, displaying my war wounds. Henry grimaced in sympathy. “Ouch.” Then he peered closer, giving me a view of his profile. He missed tall, dark, and handsome by a nose—an impressively Roman nose that owed nothing to Lisa's fist. When he looked up at me in surprise, the blue of his eyes was startling, an odd match with the rough angles of his face. “It looks like a handprint, but the fingers are too long and thin.”

Justin nodded. “Whatever grabbed her had opposable thumbs. So unless there's a five-foot-tall carnivorous raccoon out there, I think this counts as tangible evidence.”

“Fine. But evidence of what?”

The three of them looked at me, and I delayed the inevitable by digging under the stack of library books for my spiral pad of notes. “The way we figured, it could be two things. One: a rare, reclusive creature that has come near civilization because of the drought.”

“And you're ruling that out,” Lisa confirmed.

“Right. It moved way too fast for anything natural.” I drew a line diagonally across that column. “Two: a supernatural creature. Like Bigfoot, or the Loch Ness monster. Maybe there really is a goat sucker.”

Justin shook his head. “How could something exist without leaving behind any evidence besides a couple of footprints?”

“Maybe some magic keeps the monster from being photographed or documented?” I suggested.

“Even after death?” Justin asked. “Nothing in the fossil record?”

“If it's supernatural,” said Lisa, “maybe it doesn't die.”

“Everything with a body dies.”

Henry listened with a bemused expression. “So, Justin. You don't believe in Bigfoot, but you believe in spirits-angels and demons and psychic girlfriends?”

Justin smiled ruefully, as if realizing it didn't make sense. “Because they shouldn't be proven, but are. At least to me.”

Lisa had that debate-team look in her eye. “But Thomas Aquinas says that God can be proven by reason.”

“But not by physical evidence,” said Justin. “And also, that's God, not angels. And definitely not
el chupacabra.
”

I pressed my hands to my aching head. “Focus, you guys!

We don't have time to argue about the number of angels on the head of a pin. Let's come back from the theoretical extreme, okay?”

After a startled moment, Justin cleared his throat in apology. “Sure, Maggie.”

I flipped my notebook to a blank page and sat down cross-legged on the bed. “The problem is, there are a lot of factors. There's the chupacabra.” I wrote it down and circled it. “There's Doña Isabel, who is a Seer, and some kind of guardian of the land. And there's someone else we don't know about yet. A
bruja.
”

“A witch?” Justin looked over my shoulder as I circled each word on the page. “That's a lot going on in one place. No wonder you're having such a hard time figuring it out.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence.” I connected the dots into a triangle on the paper. “The problem is, I don't know how they all link together.”